Building the Global WordNet Grid

Lexical databases are built for an ever-increasing number of languages (Singh 2002, Sojka et al 2004, 2006, Vossen 1998), inspired by the development of the Princeton WordNet (Fellbaum 1998). The Global WordNet Association aims to encourage this growth and to maximize sharing and interoperability of tools and methods; another major goal is to ensure the interlinking of the databases’ lexical contents. But efforts towards interconnection and reusability have progressed unevenly and opportunistically within the community of wordnet developers. Attempts to link lexical elements have primarily relied on Princeton's English WordNet as a "hub". This presents obvious problems, as English does not lexicalize the same concepts as other languages; as a result, wordnets following this approach might well be biased towards the structure and lexical coverage of English. Another, language-independent approach is needed. At the 3rd Global WordNet Association conference, a proposal was made for building a comprehensive worldwide wordnet Grid.